Kendal Briles will ‘build the offense around’ LaNorris Sellers, USC personnel
South Carolina introduced Kendal Briles as its new offensive coordinator on Friday morning.
Briles, who comes to Columbia after three seasons at TCU, replaces Mike Shula in the role. Shula was fired in early November.
“He's a proven Power 4 offensive coordinator, and this job is not for on-the-job training,” South Carolina head coach Shane Beamer said. “When you talk about someone that has done it in this league and done it in other conferences at a high level, has done it with multiple personnel, different styles of quarterbacks. It's really impressive.”
Briles is tasked with fixing an offense that was dead last (or near the bottom) in the SEC of nearly every statistical category during a 4-8 season in 2025.
Still, South Carolina is seemingly primed to return a few key players on offense, most notably quarterback LaNorris Sellers.
Briles admitted Friday he’s “not 100% in the loop” as to what Sellers’ status is — Sellers has yet to announce, publicly at least, if he’ll be back with South Carolina in 2026 — but that he’s confident he’ll be with USC next year.
If and when Sellers returns next season, Briles said he plans to morph his offensive scheme around Sellers.
“It's really more the offense fitting around him,” Briles said. “He’s the quarterback, he's touching the ball every single snap. I'm not going to go out there and ask him to do something he's not great at, so we're going to build the offense around him, and the rest of the personnel, and do the things that he's really good at.
“So we want him to be comfortable. He's out there with people running full speed at him, probably with a bad attitude and trying to get after him. So we're going to do the things that he feels really comfortable with.”
Briles used former Arkansas quarterback KJ Jefferson — a dual-threat player he coached with a similar build and talents to Sellers — as an example of how he’d adapt his offensive scheme to his players.
“I can remember when we were back at Arkansas, 2021, which was KJ Jefferson's first start, we were doing some things offensively that probably didn't fit him great, and we changed it at halftime and we got a lot better,” Briles said. “We started doing the things that KJ was very good at, which is running the football and throwing it down the field. So I think you’ve got to figure out what your team is good at and go from there.”
Briles has only been South Carolina’s offensive coordinator for a little over a day but said he’s had some time to look over film of guys on the roster. He liked what he saw in his sneak peek of the film, but stressed he doesn’t want to judge anyone on the roster too harshly based on what they did in 2025.
“I want these guys to have a clean slate moving forward so we can judge them for what they are — whenever we see them practice and get on the football field instead of what they were,” Briles said. “But I saw some guys that are really talented and we’ve just gotta fine-tune it a little bit.”
This story was originally published December 12, 2025 at 1:30 PM.
